


The Shape Of Magic

by AstroJunk



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Clinical Depression, M/M, Roundworld AU, Slow Burn, cosmic horror, hope you read the science of discworld cause im goin hogwild baybee, lovecraft was a cunt and cosmic horror belongs to the gays
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-03-31 09:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13971960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroJunk/pseuds/AstroJunk
Summary: Ponder is a university senior with some strange dreams about math that he doesn’t understand, but maybe Rincewind does. Kind of a soulmates au, kind of a re-telling of tcom and tlf but with Ponder, /mostly/ a modern roundworld au. Lots of references to 80s synth, cosmic horror, and shout-outs to sci-fi pulp novels and anthologies.





	1. Then Blink

Around two the traffic got bad. Ponder always tried to be out of the parking lot of the compsci building before then, but he was running late. He was running late because he had woken up late that morning. He woke up late because the floor downstairs of his hall was having a party that went on longer than was advertised in the flyers that were taped to every window of the building. This was the major drawback of still living in a freshman dorm as a senior, but most of those kids didn’t even have cars and so there was always plenty of parking and the dorm was centrally located on campus, making his morning walk to the dining hall shorter than it would be had he taken up residence in the senior cottages on the northern edges of the university. There was another secret reason he still lived in a freshman dorm, there was no better ego boost than being called “sir” on a regular basis, and most freshman mistook him for an adjunct professor. The kind of mistake only a freshman could make, because to anybody else on campus with any real knowledge of the world would take one look at him and see behind the coke bottle glasses that he was exactly as confused and helpless as everyone else.

The binders under his arms were threatening to slip as he stumbled finally to his car, a light brown two decade old Sonata that used to be powder blue. He threw the materials into the passenger’s seat and started the engine. There was already a line five cars long trying to get out of the parking lot, he debated whether or not he should just sit and wait for the line to go down or bully his way out. He was already late, what was one minute or thirty if you’re already behind? It’s all the same, he thought, late is late. The engine rocked and racketed and sent little familiar shock waves through the car that jostled the tower of books and binders strapped into the passenger’s seat. I’m going to look like such an idiot, he thought.

 

Forty minutes later the Sonata arrived at rear parking lot of a West End oyster restaurant. Overhead, clouds were gathering over the city and threatening to start snowing. Don’t do it, Ponder squinted up at them, don’t you dare. The clouds didn’t answer. Ponder, tucking a scarf into his jacket, made his way to the double glass doors of the Mother Shucker. The scene inside was that of an average Wednesday, business men romancing customers over late lunches and, of course, at least one yuppie family with a newborn in a highchair watching a YouTube playlist on an iPad. He walked passed the main dining room and to the far corner where a staircase was hidden behind a beaded curtain. 

Upstairs there were fewer tables than the main dining room, and there was a small stage upon which the publishing director was already reading off announcements.

“Before the end of this month we need to have at least one more editorial meeting for the winter issue,” He continued, his bushy brow furrowing at a notepad in his hand that was crumpled from years of obsessive notation and being taken in and out of jacket pockets. “Our regular date for release is, hm, the first of December. I’d like it if we could keep it that way, hello Stibbons glad you could join us.”

Ponder slinked into a bar stool at the only table left, feeling the pressure of shame weighing on him like a diver in the deep sea. The publishing director continued. Ponder tried to pay attention, but his phone buzzed. There was a text from Adrian, affectionately named labeled as That Dumb Son of A Bitch in Ponder’s contact list. He glanced around the room and found Adrian was sitting on the opposite side of the room, close to the heater where everyone who arrived early always set up. The text read:

 

u ok

 

Ponder typed a response discreetly.

 

Traffic :/

 

Adrian replied.

 

drinks after?

 

From across the room, Ponder offered an ok hand sign, to which Adrian responded by reciprocating the signal. Good old Adrian, he was a lanky, curly haired, functioning alcoholic angel. The friendship between The two men had been forged in the fires of academia and seasonal depression. It was said that no true academic had a friend in the world, only competition, but Ponder had come to his own conclusion about this archaic belief and that it was horseshit. He and Adrian had suffered and survived together screaming nights and horrid introspective drama, the kind that, truly whether you wanted to or not, really forced you to become close with someone. Luckily for Ponder, Adrian had turned out to be a trustworthy and loyal man, and for Ponder’s part so was he, and so the relationship remained mutual and only on rare, usually deadline-related occasions, combative.

 

The meeting wasn’t of great interest to Ponder, he’d heard it all before. We’re behind on blah blah, so and so is in town and wants to collaborate on something, you all need to come to this other meeting but it’s not really mandatory but I will judge you harshly if you don’t show up. All of this was only a formality for Ponder, he was gunning for the directors chair and would likely get it by this time next year. Nobody at the university had been as dedicated to the discovery and preservation of, what the publishing department referred to as, lost texts. The lost texts were essays, articles, schematics, drawings, and field notes of academic importance that had, usually through colonial violence, been suppressed or otherwise destroyed. In fact, he had created the virtual archive of translations, transcriptions, findings, and articles about these lost texts in his freshman year, and he had been maintaining it in a moderators position ever since. But his ambitions reached farther than simply archiving lost knowledge. 

There was a project taking shape in his mind that he had been sitting on for months, he wasn’t sure what shape it would take but he knew that there was  _ something else _ he could be doing with the archive. It wasn’t the sort of project that you could write down or even describe to someone else, it was an ethereal idea that passed through his mind like a ghost through closed doors, it was a passion that textured his thoughts and words in ways he had a hard time articulating. It was something, but only that. Just a thing, just a loose collection of thoughts and ideas, but it was all that he could think about. The inception of this dreamlike dancing concept was equally as abstract. It very literally came to him in a dream.

 

In the dream, he was floating. There was a light ahead of him blooming and on its radiant edges was an ever-shifting ring of color. In the dream, he knew what the color was, but when he awoke he couldn’t quite describe it. It was as if he had been seeing in black and white his entire life. As the light grew around him, the black void he was floating in became a hypnotic sea of this strange new color, and he felt as if he was being stretched from one end of the universe to the other and back again in a perfect ring. And then he thought, within the dream, clear as a bell sounds,  _ this is the eighth.  _ That was all. And to even recall it he felt embarrassed of its simplicity. Everyone thinks that they have important dreams, because in the moment they feel important. But the importance of this one stuck around inside of him, it bubbled up to the surface of his thoughts and he chewed on it like a gum that never lost its flavor. It was hanging around, and so far that hadn’t been a bad thing. It probably meant nothing, but then again, what if it didn’t?

He would never tell another living soul about the fantasy, it was just too ridiculous and he didn’t need any help being ostracized by academia. He had already been labeled a  _ conceptual  _ man by most of his peers. This was a polite way of suggesting that he was out of touch with the solid realities of the world. Other labels he had received were  _ unconventional _ and  _ unique _ , which when spoken with the right dosage of polite hostility took on very oppressive meanings. They were the kind of words used to dismiss things, in the same way that a teacher might say that a child marches to the beat of their own drum in class when searching for a polite way to tell the parents of that child that their son ate glue. Such is life. 

 

When the meeting was over, the meeting that always took place at an oyster bar because the current publishing director unfortunately thought of himself as hip and interesting, Ponder and Adrian walked down the snowy street of the West End toward the more affordable side of the city. There was a bar nestled between a parking garage and a condemned Jersey Mike’s that the two had frequented for many years, as did a lot of the younger blood in the university. Adrian, being a Dumb Son Of A Bitch, started the night off with whistlepig and imported goon. 

“I haven’t seen you in the lab in a week,” He said, settling into his usual cross-legged posture in the booth.

“Didn’t have the chance to swing by, I’ve been staying in a lot recently.” Ponder leaned over his winter lager. 

“Depressed or busy?” Ponder sucked his teeth.

“Both-ish?” Adrian communicated the depth of his understanding with a slow nod and a long drink from an already nearly empty glass. “We’re getting so close, man. Grad school is just around the corner.” Ponder took a drink. It was just around the corner, in the same way that a stranger with a knife in a dark alley could be, and just like the stranger, it wanted all of your money. The music in the bar changed, from Yaz to Depeche Mode. A definitive mood shift. “About that,” Adrian continued. “You know I want to take a gap year.”

“Of course,” Ponder hovered over his lager tentatively. Adrian cleared his throat.

“Well, I’m thinking of doing a little more than that.” Ponder’s eyebrow raised unbeknownst to him. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Adrian scratched his chin, embarrassed, “I’m actually thinking about moving.”

“Where to?” There was silence. Relative silence, as Suffer Well was starting to fade into Going Backwards.

“Australia.” Ponder nearly choked.

“You’re kidding, that’s literally the other side of the world.” Adrian shrugged. He was That Dumb Son of A Bitch. Ponder leaned in, pulling a serious, parental sort of face. “Have you actually thought this through at all?”

“You know all those internships I was applying to a while back?”

“The great manic episode of last February, I remember.”

“I actually got one.” Adrian pulled out his phone and found the email of his acceptance letter, sliding the phone across the table for Ponder’s approval. Ponder nodded, it was impressive. The position was at a tech start-up, one of those Elon Musk-type new tech hellscapes that chewed up funds and spat out products that were so specific in nature, nobody besides a silicon millionaire would have any practical purpose for it, like a new-age juicer or a private helicopter service. But there were some big names attached to it, names that would make a resume look dazzling. Ponder looked up from the phone at his friend, who was beaming with pride behind is drunk red cheeks.

Ponder thought about saying something reasonable. He thought about saying something along the lines of this is a horrible idea,  _ you’ve never even been there and you don't know anybody and you’ve never been good with money and you’re making a huge mistake.  _ But there was a wiser part of him that had developed in recent years that had a way of filtering his real thoughts through a less self-serving lens. And it was self-serving, Ponder knew. He wasn’t so blind to his own emotions that he couldn’t see that. And look at him, thought Ponder. He’s so happy. Ponder slid the phone back to him.

“You’re going to do really well there,” He said finally. Adrian let out a long breath that he’d been holding in anticipation. It did mean a lot to Ponder that his friend clearly thought highly of his approval, and besides, the internet existed. They could keep in touch.

“Man, I’m so excited, you have no idea. I did a Skype call last night with the hiring manager there and he did a virtual tour of the office and they have blah blah blah blah blah —” Something was ringing in Ponder’s ears.

The world was closing around him, and the sounds and lights of the bar were falling away to a little dark tunnel that stretched out before him. The ringing was sharp and constant and he could feel it through his entire body like tinnitus in his soul. The world had gone to this singular cone of vision and this one ringing bell.  _ There’s nobody else _ , he thought. Only he wasn’t thinking it, it was a thought that freely manifested in his mind. Instead of coming from within, the voice that he heard in his mind came from without.  _ There’s nobody else who can help me _ , it continued. 

What? Ponder thought back. Help with what?

_ Nobody else can make this happen. _

Make what happen?

_ It needs to be done. _

Ponder could feel it, the drifting and pulling of floating in the dreamy void. He tried his best not to stretch too thin, but the vacuum was powerful and soon he could no longer see anything but the tiny pearl of light at the end of the tunnel growing dimmer as the ringing grew louder.

_ Build it. _

He had been gripping the table’s edges so tightly that his knuckles cracked. “I said, are you feeling okay?” Ponder looked up. The world was still there, including Adrian who had a few more empty glasses around him than Ponder remembered there being. Ponder’s own glass was still nearly full.

“Yeah,” He shook his head, “I just didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Maybe you should get home. Turn in, get some sleep. You kind of look like shit honestly, I wasn’t going to say anything, but you have that Peter Lorre eyeball thing going on.” Adrian gestured to his face with a floppy hand. 

“Thanks, I own a mirror, I know what I look like.”

“You own a mirror?” Adrian leaned in, feigning surprise. Ponder clapped his friend on the shoulder.

“Have a good night.”

“Take it easy, my dude.”

 

Ponder drove back to his dorms through the snow. It had been slowly and silently blanketing the city for hours, making the edges of things appear softer than they usually were, some banks already forming on the sides of buildings and in the gutters. Through the long and silent drive, Ponder stayed his thoughts on the snow. It was all that he would let himself think about, easy pedestrian thoughts that weren’t too challenging. He would have all night to stay awake and worry about the things he should be worrying about, but just for the slow, careful drive, he would think about snow.

Snow was fractals really, wasn’t it? Ponder had always been fascinated with the math of nature, the reoccurring spirals and sequences that shaped life. They were the very basis of all things. When you got down to it, everything was numbers. Just complicated sets of numbers that were difficult to understand. A pile of snow was a single snowflake which was molecules of water which was atoms, and the background radiation of the big bang filled the spaces between all of them and connected them like the sea. That was the comfortable idea Ponder had about the universe, it was interconnected and deep down it all made sense, somewhere in what appeared to be chaos it was all sequence. He found himself meditating on all of this as he climbed the staircase to his hall. Inside of his room he continued to think about the beautiful interplay of numbers in the cosmic dance of life as he threw his pants into the hamper and flopped down onto the mattress, and having thoroughly hypnotized himself with his own introspection, he fell into a dreamless sleep.

 

The following day, Ponder had a headache that he couldn’t explain. It followed him through breakfast clear into lunchtime, when after having attended his only lecture for the day, he walked aimlessly around the library because it was a good place to be aimless. It was free, and it was easy to look like you were doing something important, thus ideal. The university library was the largest in the city by a wide margin, and being a part of the publishing department he had always felt like a sort of deputy librarian. He did read a lot, after all. He read everything that the university published, every paper that went out went by his desk at some point, and beyond that he even read in his very limited free time. Because of this, he had become tangentially acquainted with the head librarian who was widely known for his mood swings. It was always a good idea to be friends with librarians, Ponder found, because the library was a place where a student’s soul was laid bare. It was where they openly, but quietly, wept while trying to finish a paper that was due in three hours and worth half their final grade. And if you did anything in the library, a librarian saw you, you could be sure of that.

But there was one librarian Ponder didn’t know very well. He wasn’t exactly a librarian, he was some kind of part-time man. He came and went like a strange mood, and he wasn’t a professor or a student as far as Ponder knew. Ponder could see him through a gap in the bookcase he was stood in front of that gave a view directly into the lounge section, where chairs were scattered about and three large oak tables were overtaken with stack of literature. The strange librarian had a rat-like quality to him. His hair was long, you could see his knees through his pants like they were trying to get out, and he never looked very relaxed. There was a natural aura of suspicion around him. It seemed, as Ponder continued to look on, that he was in the middle of some kind of uncomfortable conversation with the head librarian. 

Ponder knew it wasn’t good to snoop, but he wasn't actually snooping. He was only trying to take his mind off of things and whatever he heard wasn’t his fault. Of all people, librarians should know not to speak so loud in a library.

“There’s nothing I can do at this point, that’s what I’m saying,” Said the head librarian. “If the archchancellor puts pressure on me to refine the budget then I don’t have a choice.”

“Okay, I hear you, but you do have a choice to keep me on.”

“I know, I’m making that choice, I’m just warning you that if he actually does what he says he’s going to do and throttle my budget, he’s going to look at unnecessary expenditures first and at that point I really can’t do anything.” The ratty man’s shoulders sagged. The tension between them wasn’t that of a superior and an employee, it felt more familial. Ponder felt that he had accidentally trespassed on some sort of family drama. The ratty man put his face in his hands and moaned.

“I am drowning in debt, Henry.”

“I know,” said the head librarian with an unfamiliar softness. “We all are. I’m going to be paying off loans until I’m dead.”

“But that’s the thing, you can actually pay them!” He stood up and collected his jacket from the back of the chair, swinging it around himself. “I’ve got an appointment to make, but just please keep me updated on this.”

“Of course, I’m going to let them just kick you out.” They shook hands, Ponder turned around and picked a random book from the shelf behind him in an attempt to look preoccupied. The ratty man walked past him with his long coat floating behind him. Ponder felt a tension in his chest. Probably, he thought, it was time to do some real thinking about his future as well. Especially in the immediate sense, because he really did have a paper he needed to be working on.

 

He decided to do that work in the vegan cafeteria. It was empty virtually always and nobody was really sure why the university even had it. It was a small little building in the basement of the main dining hall with only three small tables, but they served hot soup all day and the privacy was a good aid to work, so he sipped his vegan soup carefully as he leaned over his laptop and tried to focus on writing. There was a zen to throwing yourself into work, it kept you feeling functional and productive and if you ignored your desperate internal need for emotional validation and release, then it kept you going strong for a little while. There was always a fallout afterwords of course, but that was for the future Ponder to deal with and the Ponder of the present was being functional and productive and that was really all that mattered.

At least, he was being functional and productive until the ratty man from the library came down the stairs from the main dining hall and ordered a potato salad. Ponder felt the heat of shame in his cheeks. He knew more about this strangers life than he wanted to know, and at the moment it was a little more information than he could handle. It was also a little too close to home, but the ratty man sat silently on the other side of the room, scrolling mindlessly through his phone and looking rather pitiful. Ponder’s stomach crawled, he’d always had issues with mending incongruences with his personal ethics and unethical actions in his mind, but he was in a particularly volatile state at the moment so he was feeling it harder than usual. I should say something, he thought. Just a little something.

Ponder looked up from his screen. The man was still staring down at his phone. Ponder bit his lip trying to think of something comforting, but not too revealing to say. 

“Crazy weather, right?” He said. The ratty man didn’t look up from his phone, then suddenly he did.

“Excuse me?” He said, confused.

“The weather,” Ponder pointed to the little stained-glass window with the only direct view outside that either of them could see, “It’s getting bad out there, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s a nor'easter, supposed to be eight inches by tomorrow.”

“Really?” Ponder feigned ignorance, as though every weather channel in the area hadn’t been talking about the coming blizzard non-stop for weeks.

“Supposedly. Just glad my heater works.”

“Yeah,” Ponder laughed. Well, he thought, returning to his work, that was my good deed for the day. 

 

Rincewind, who was the ratty man, was having a hard time lately. He was always having a hard time really, he tended to make times hard with sheer willpower, though he was almost never aware of this. If Rincewind was offered a warm blanket on a cold night he would refuse it because he would have convinced himself that the blanket had small pox, and anyway it’s best to keep to yourself. But the nights were getting colder, and that was the problem. They were getting cold and long and unsure. At least my heater works, he thought, walking back to the library’s storage closet which he’d converted into a bedroom. There was a twin mattress tucked below the shelf on the far wall which extended to the ceiling and was full of multitudes. Somewhere in the mess, there was a small cactus. The room itself was only about one step in length and width.

With a casual foot he flipped the switch on the little space heater in the corner behind the door and ducked into the little nook of his bed, under which he crouched and continued to stare at his bank records. They were abysmal. He had seven dollars to his name and even that wouldn’t be there long as there was surely a fee coming his way for going below twenty five, and then where would he be? Rincewind liked to believe he was too proud for handouts but he also had enough of a self-preservation instinct to know that pride is for the rich. Henry had been the closest thing to a friend he’d had, keeping him employed and turning a blind eye to all the days Rincewind spent doing absolutely nothing but sitting in bed. But he also gave annoying advice like “Chin up, stooge” and “Darkest before dawn” and all that. Sentiments that weren’t devoid of genuine concern but didn’t ever seem to have any practical application. 

The sort of advice Rincewind wanted was “Here’s 10,000,000 dollars and a job that doesn’t fire you for taking an absurd amount of personal days” which wasn’t actually advice but rather a comfy daydream that he sometimes languished in if he was feeling particularly indulgent. Rincewind let out a long and pitiful sigh that made him glad to be in a private space. It was a little too honest. Above him, on the bottom shelf that hung over his mattress, Rincewind had pinned one of the dust jackets off of a copy of Other Dimensions because he liked the art and it gave him something to look at. It depicted an abstract castle of flying buttresses and obelisk towers, and the whole thing was set atop textureless blocks that seemed to float over a glass-like surface, surrounded by thin fog. Behind the castle was a large moon, and behind the moon were stars, and printed in bottom-heavy 70’s lettering was the title. The castle was another of the indulgent daydreams that he’d come to love. 

It was familiar in that he had seen it every day for several years, aside the years he’d spent carrying the anthology around in a school bag, but foreign in subtlety. There was always a new face or crack to find in the grey, deep walls of the castle. It was futuristic and at the same time called to mind Mount Saint Michael in its architecture and isolation. Occasionally he would pass his eyes over it and think for a moment that, within the shadow of one of the buttresses, that he could see someone standing there. It was an isolated world on the cover of a book. He dozed off, thinking about walking inside of the castle, what must the rooms look like, how big must they be, what would live there. 

 

But he couldn’t rest for long. Before he knew it, he was floating. He could feel it, like resting just on the surface of a room-temperature bath. And then there was the strange light ahead of him, the light that made every color he had ever known seem as though they were all grey. And then there were the patterns, the floating lotus-like crosses and lines of unknowable complexity that, if he’d had a neck inside of the dream, he would have broken trying to take them all in. They were surrounding and encompassing, around and through. Impossibly detailed, impossibly large, and every time he tried to focus on a singular point he found that it moved and shifted in a way that his eye couldn’t settle on. 

There were numbers, too, though he paid less attention to them. He’d never been particularly gifted with numbers, which was largely to blame for his heinously poor grades in physics and calculus. Had he been a more mathematically inclined man however, they still wouldn’t mean much. It was as if they were in another language, but they couldn’t be. While he had little skill in numbers he had great skill in language, and he knew languages, and this wasn’t any script he was familiar with. It was more like every number was slightly transparent and there was another secret number hiding beneath it, and to see them both simultaneously made it impossible to perceive either of them. But just maybe, if you looked at it the right way, and if the damn patterns would stop shifting around, maybe it would make sense. Maybe he could finally see whatever it was he was supposed to see.

He couldn’t. His eyes slammed open, the knocking at his door growing more urgent. Tactfully ducking under the bottom shelf, he answered. It was Henry, looking a lot worse for wear. 

“Have you looked outside?” He said, trying to disguise his urgency. Rincewind was still half-asleep and only responded with a dazed expression of confusion. Henry backed away from the door and motioned to the window down the hall. Rincewind walked to it slowly. The closer that he came, the more fear creept into him. He saw the trees first, in the courtyard, that were bathed in that familiar light. That color that put other colors to shame. And then his eyes moved upwards. 

 

Ponder slept through the night uneasily. Not since he was a little boy had he been afraid of nightmares, but the striking similarities between  _ the dream  _ and whatever vision he’d had the other night at the bar were getting to him. If this was going to become a pattern, he wasn’t looking forward to it. But before he had a chance to lay down his head, a strange murmur spread through his floor. Just curious enough and willing to do anything to avoid sleeping at that point, he wandered out of his room to the end of the hall where several of his neighbors were gathered around the window.

“What’s going on?” He asked. A man named Trusett who was trying to record something on his phone was the only one who took notice of Ponder.

“Just take a look.” Ponder politely found his way through the throng to the edge of the window, where in the storming night sky he saw the eye. It had a halo of that impossible color he’d seen before in his dreams, the strange holographic shifting hue that made his head ache. It had run over the world below it with a paintbrush and all around the university campus there were faint lines of some sort of connective pattern, all linking back to the center of the eye.

The center of the eye. Ponder blinked and looked away. It was impossible to stare directly into it, it made him weak in the knees and struck him as a kind of primal enemy. It was fearsome in the same way that hearing a bump in the night was. It was an instinct programmed into the human consciousness from a time when the bump meant a bear is in my cave.

“It’s making my eyes water.” Said one of the men gawking at the view.

“Then blink.” Someone responded.


	2. Theories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The librarian eats a cream cheese bagel, doomsday draws nearer, and Ponder and Rincewind have a heart-to-heart. A short chapter.

The sky stayed that way all night, possessed by the eye, and the following morning it had vanished. It seemed nobody actually saw the thing go, it simply slipped away as the faint light that could make its way through the thick snow cloud cover took over. Stranger still, once it had vanished, it seemed nobody could recall seeing it.

“Mister Stibbons, I’m fairly sure I would remember something like that,” Said the dean, whom Ponder had only just managed to wrangle into a conversation during breakfast.

“You’re quite sure?” Ponder pleaded. 

“Yes, very, now if you’ll excuse me I would like to have breakfast in peace please. I’ve got a nasty headache at the moment.” Ponder backed away from the table. He’d been asking around all morning. Nobody seemed to remember anything, not the eye, not the strange color or the patterns, not a thing. As far as anybody on the campus was concerned, it was another average night. The snowfall had brought a fresh layer of frozen inconvenience to shovel and by ten the walkways were relatively clear. But it couldn’t have been a dream. Ponder knew very well what a dream felt like, it was full of little holes that, come morning, you were slapping yourself for not seeing in the moment. Details that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. But everything about last night made perfect sense. He had seen the eye floating in the sky, and it had radiated that strange color, and there had been patterns of some interwoven connection that spread through everything like a ghost. 

He was the only one who remembered. No, he thought. I can’t be the only one. We have cellphones with cameras and meteorologists, someone else saw it and remembered. It was recorded, it must have been, by thousands, if not millions of cameras. The truth was out there somewhere.

 

Rincewind remembered. He wished he hadn’t once he realized he was the only one. He’d read enough fiction to realize that being the only person who knows something like that is always a terrible thing. But maybe it was something he could ignore. Maybe, because nobody else seemed to remember, it didn’t matter that he did,  _ because _ he was the only one. Being the keeper of terrible knowledge might not be such a horrible thing if he didn’t actually have to do anything with that knowledge. But he knew better. This was a long time coming, he felt it in his bones. Foreshadowing unfortunately does exist in real life sometimes.

He was taking his breakfast in the vegan cafeteria again because the more he could avoid being seen by administrative staff the better. He knew none of them would ever even think to venture into the vegan cafeteria, in fact he was nearly sure that they didn’t know it existed. A perfect blind spot in which to ride out the storm. He peeked into his banking app once more and then decided against ordering anything and sat down. It had been a long night that was becoming a long day, but if I can just make it through this, he thought, just one more day, and maybe one night without seeing the horrible eye, maybe that would mean that none of this had mattered. It was like a phase of the moon, he reasoned, something that came and went.

Rincewind had some experience in the field of keeping terrible knowledge. For nearly a decade he had been having dreams about the strange light and the patterns. They made it hard to sleep at night sometimes, but like a path through the forest beaten down by centuries of travelers, the dreams had become simply another aspect of life. He’d lost his sense of curiosity about them and he no longer cared. His philosophy was that curiosity was ultimately pointless when the subject of that curiosity was something so far removed from any real-world practicality. He could spend all day thinking about the patterns, but that wouldn’t keep him fed or a roof over his head.

All he had wanted to be was the kind of man who got by on knowing the things that were important to know. Things that made you prestigious, things that really meant something in the world, things with practical applications. Things that were real, or what he considered to be real. Language was real. It could be written and spoken and communicated physically, language made an immediate impact on people and the world around them. It meant connections and change, language wasn’t just letters it was culture and change. Geography and economics, all things could be understood by, and indeed elaborated on, under the umbrella of language. But an english degree gets you nowhere but teaching english, and while Rincewind was sure that some day that would be his future, he wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. He’d held on to a childish dream that maybe simply being alive was good enough, that you didn’t have to  _ produce  _ to validate whatever space you took up in the world. He’d been escaping the realities of labor for too long, and the debt would only continue to grow. There was enough to worry about in the real world before he could even have a chance to think about whatever was going on in his dreams.

 

Ponder found a seat in the vegan cafeteria once more, having run himself ragged for the entire morning darting back and forth between buildings and people like a pinball, searching for the hard evidence that he knew must exist. There was a debate inside of him, on one side he knew that what he had seen was real, but on the other was the growing pile of evidence that this belief may not be true. When you get down to it, if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, he thought. And without hard evidence that the strange eye did manifest in the sky last night, he had no hope of figuring its scale or luminescence or anything else that might have made it possible to understand the thing. 

He’d been gripping a loose quarter in his jacket pocket, nervously tracing the ridges of the rim with his thumb. For once, he had no books or papers or even a laptop in front of him. Instead, he saw the ratty man from the library. He was sitting at the table opposite Ponder, looking similarly pre-occupied and lost in himself. There might be a chance, Ponder thought. I may as well ask.

“Excuse me,” He started. Rincewind snapped out of his daydream and he met Ponder’s eyes.

“Hm?”

“Strange question, but did you look outside last night?” Rincewind froze. 

“Why do you ask?” 

“It’s nothing really,” Ponder fiddled with the arm of his glasses behind his ear, “It’s just this weather.” He shrugged. Rincewind leaned back into his chair apprehensively. He didn’t like where this was going.

“Yes,” He agreed. Ponder felt ridiculous. Even Adrian hadn’t seen anything last night, or at least claimed that he hadn’t. If he truly was alone with this knowledge then there was no way to prove to himself that it had truly happened, and by his own logic that would force him to confront the uncomfortable concept that he might truly have dreamed the whole event. But that couldn’t be true, it just didn’t feel right. Ponder continued to speak, after a moment’s pause.

“It’s only that, well it’s kind of stupid, but I thought I saw something strange in the sky.” A wave of despair rolled over Rincewind. Oh no, oh god no, he thought, please don’t be thinking what I think you’re thinking. Please just be insane. Please just go away. Rincewind coughed. 

“It was snowing,” He said, “Pretty hard, all night.”

“Yes,” Ponder nodded, defeat creeping into his voice. He had the look of a deflated balloon, something that at one point was straining to break free of its string but had been worn down by the passage of time until it was withered and not nearly as decorative. There was a cold tingle running down Rincewind’s spine, the familiar sensation of fear. He tried to stand up, but before he could, the world became a tunnel of dark before him, and his body felt as if it had turned to stone. Oh no, he thought. No, no, don’t do this to me. Just let me leave, just let me leave this all alone.

 

_ Speak. _

I really can’t, I can’t and I won’t. I’m leaving and I’m putting this behind me.

_ You must. _

I really mustn't. 

_ You will. _

 

Ponder looked up from his twiddling thumbs to see that the man before him was staring deeply into space, a horrible blankness on his face and his green eyes were dilated so fully and darkly that Ponder thought he could see stars within them.

“Are you alright?” He offered. Rincewind continued to stare.

“You saw the eye.” His voice was distant, as if he were calling out to Ponder over a stormy sea. Ponder shot out of his chair and nearly fell over himself lunging at Rincewind’s table, keeping his eyes locked firmly into the other man’s.

“Then you saw it too,” He said. Rincewind’s pupils shrunk back to their normal size, and he looked as though he’d just woken from a dream.

“I didn’t say anything,” He said, storming out of his seat and making for the stairs back up to the main dining hall. Ponder followed adamantly. 

“You said something about the eye, you saw the eye!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, leave me alone.” Rincewind’s pace quickened as they reached the top of the stairs, he tried his best to lose Ponder in the crowd, but the short, stubby man found him again just before reaching the door. Ponder was the only thing that stood between Rincewind and a clean exit.

“What do you know about the eye?” He said, a little louder than perhaps he had intended, as there were several eyes watching the two of them now. 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rincewind hissed, “Just leave it alone.” He forced his way passed Ponder and walked briskly, just fast enough so that it would be near impossible to keep up, but not so fast as to draw suspicion, until he reached the gate on the edge of the campus and made his way into the surrounding city. Once Rincewind had a good pace, no man could catch him. Ponder was left in the courtyard, standing under a bare tree by a snowbank, cursing himself for losing the man. But he’ll come back, he thought. He has to.

 

Meanwhile, Ponder had his evidence. Another person saw the eye, even if he was pretending that he didn’t. Maybe that meant he knew more about it, in fact Ponder was sure that it did. And in the back of his mind, the project, the one that came to him in his first dream, was pushing its way further and further to the forefront, making itself bigger and more important, taking up as much space as it could until it seemed that truly Ponder’s only focus in life had become understanding whatever it was he was meant to understand from the vision. Things would soon start happening a lot faster, he was sure of it.

Rincewind did have to return to the university, its where all of his stuff was. And it was warm at night in his little storage closet. He snuck back through the gates once the sun had started to set, taking the longest, most backwards route to the library in the hopes that if the weird little man with the glasses was still looking for him, that maybe he could slip by undetected. It wasn’t to be.

Ponder was waiting in the library. Rincewind saw the back of his head from the front door and ducked down behind the check-out counter. Shit, he thought. There was no clear line to get from where he was to his room without being seen. You hear things about people working in the library, and he knew that Ponder was considered a cerebral sort of guy. People with their head in the clouds rarely had any regard for those who had their feet planted firmly on the ground, he considered, and he figured Ponder to be the sort of man who thought more about ideas than he did about people, which was the kind of mindset that could lead to a lot of trouble for a lot of people very easily. Rincewind also knew about the lost texts archive department, which often coordinated directly with the head librarian. They did a lot of good in preserving materials that would otherwise have been lost to time, but being a man who was very much stuck in his ways, he was weary of all this virtual library business. Things needed to be physical in some aspect, books especially. It was in Rincewind's opinion that a lot was lost from a book when it was only an image on a screen, never mind the very real and imminent threat that it posed to him as one whose only real job had ever been handling physical books. 

Rincewind, still crouching behind the front desk, felt a light kick to his back. He turned his head.

"Mister Stibbons has been sitting there waiting for you for an hour now," Said Henry, a friendly kind of scowl on his face, the sort of look you get on a father when his son brings live frogs into the house. 

"And you just let him?" Rincewind hissed. He pulled himself up to his full height and Ponder in the distance waved happily at the two of them.

"He said it was of the utmost importance. Also, he brought me cream cheese bagel."

"The devious bastard." Henry let his voice trail behind him as he made his way to his secluded little office in the center of the main library floor.

"You need to start making more friends."

Ponder sat neatly in one of the cushy leather chairs with the high backs that were placed around a low table next to the non-fiction section. Rincewind stood before him and radiated as much negative energy as he could manage, not saying a word.

"About what time did you see it?" Ponder asked.

"I didn't see anything."

"Okay," Ponder nodded slowly, working out an angle for interrogation in his head, "Well supposing you had seen something, you wouldn't have happened to get a picture of it would you?" Rincewind glared hard.

"You're never going to let this go, are you?" There was a determination in Ponder's face that struck fear in Rincewind's heart. Here was a man who, as far as Rincewind was concerned, had no status, no title, and in the grand scheme of academia meant very little to anybody. He wasn't even post-grad, and weren't students supposed to be pulling their hair out this time of year? Winter break was in the very near future and that meant a lot of work needed to be finished in very little time, the days were growing shorter, and the crushing weight of student debt must surely be bearing down on him by now. The reality that the real world looms ahead in the very near future, and all of the terrible truths that come with life in the private sector. But Ponder didn't seem to care about all of that. Maybe it was because he was the _cerebral_ type. Things like deadlines and debts were too immediate, too real for someone like that to be concerned about when there were much bigger problems. Existential types of problems, the kind that Rincewind dedicated nearly every waking hour of his life to avoiding. Problems that were bigger than one man could hold.

"I can't," Ponder replied, the reflection from his glasses a white glare. Rincewind took a deep breath and sat down the chair opposite him, cradling his head in his hands. He kept his eyes down as he spoke. It was probably time to face the music, the sad violin music that signaled the sinking of a very big ship.

"I didn't want anything to do with this. I've never wanted anything to do with this."

"Never wanted anything to do with what?" Ponder leaned in. His mind was on fire, it had been on fire since last night. The lingering dreams he'd been having, that idea, the project, whatever it was, was calling out to him now louder than it ever had. And it all pointed to this one man. I have to know, said a voice inside of him, I need to know. I need to know everything.

Rincewind was having his own internal issues. Vulnerability had never been something he'd offered freely, or ever if he could help it. And certainly the subject of his own strange dreams felt very vulnerable. He hadn't spoken to a single soul about them and he didn't particularly want to break that record now, especially not with the strange man with glowing glasses whose mad determination felt to Rincewind like a hot knife at his throat. But maybe, he thought, if I just get this all over with now it will finally be out of my hands. Maybe I just have this one terrible conversation and then I never have to deal with any of this again. He knew that wasn't going to be the case, of course. He was smarter than that. Rincewind met Ponder's eyes, something he greatly regretted, because when he saw them they were bright and brilliant and just as terrifying as he'd imagined.

"I saw the eye," He said after some struggling to get the words out right. Ponder barely blinked.

"Did you get any pictures? A video? Anything?"

"No."  


"Why not?" Rincewind scoffed.

"Well if you care so much why didn't you take a picture?" 

"I did," Ponder pulled a phone from his pocket and thumbed through his camera roll, "Only when I looked at them this morning they were all grayed out. I tried uploading them to my computer but it was the same there as well. Also, I've noticed that my memory about it seems to have been getting worse all day. Just this morning I could recall everything that I did last night very clearly, but now I can't seem to remember it so well. That could just be a natural phenomenon, memory isn't the most reliable thing in the world, but I can't help but think its somehow related to how nobody else on this campus, or anywhere, remembers the eye at all."

"Its because they didn't really see it."

"Excuse me?"

"Hm?" 

"Elaborate on what you just said." Rincewind was baffled. What had he just said? Before he could get a chance to clarify, Ponder continued, studying his face. "It sounded just like what you said earlier. Your voice changed." His eyes narrowed, "Does that happen often?" A cold sweat ran down Rincewind's neck. 

"Not until recently, no."

"It must be connected, there's something that's trying to use you to communicate."

"That's a bold conclusion on very little evidence, I thought you were a compsci student."

"Theoretical computer science is my major."

"Ah, I see." 

Ponder's intensity died off slightly as he sat back in his chair. 

"But I do have some evidence, evidence of a kind I think." Finally, Rincewind thought, things were shifting around. Now it was his turn to be obnoxiously inquisitive. 

"Oh you do?"

"Yes. I've had, well it's silly to say out loud, but I've had some dreams, I think, that maybe correlate to whatever is going on. And Ever since I've had them I've also had this kind of _feeling._ It doesn't feel like its a part of me somehow." Rincewind puzzled. This was far more information than he actually wanted to know. "But," Ponder brightened, "I think it may be something similar." In a slightly more desperate voice, he added, "Do you think that makes sense?"

Turning him away now would be like kicking a puppy, thought Rincewind. He was, after all, just a man. A man who seemed to be as lost in the cosmic confluence of confusion as he was. Only, unlike Rincewind himself, Ponder had no intention of simply riding the waves. He wanted to really look at them. He wanted to know where they were coming from and where they were going. 

"I agree," Said Rincewind finally. The wind outside the library was really kicking up, knocking the windows and sending swirling clouds of dark snow up into the sunset sky. "What do you think we can do about this?" His sincere tone struck a chord with Ponder. Not since his last conversation with Adrian had he really felt like anybody had listened to him. 

"I'm not sure, but there must be something. I feel like we've got a few missing pieces to put together and then this will all make sense."

"I hope you're right."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Per a throwaway joke in tcom, I've set UU in modern New Jersey, just to clear things up. I realized kind of late that not mentioning that might throw UK discworld fans off about how university debt works in the US. Next chapter is probably going to take a while jsyk.


	3. All Turtles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rincewind and Ponder eat Doritos.

Over the next seven days, Ponder and Rincewind met in the library regularly to discuss. Rincewind was often unsure of what the goals of these meetings were intended to be, but he was relatively sure that they existed. Over time, Ponder had amassed a collection of notes in a thick three-ringed binder, organized impeccably with tabs and sheet protectors. There was a section in which he’d scribbled bullet list notes on the details of Rincewind’s reoccurring dreams on one side of a page, and on the other was a list of details from his own dreams, and between them he’d made criss crossing connections in red ink to similar themes and points of interest. He was so sure that it meant something. Connections that consistent don’t occur for no reason. And everything was patterns when you got down to it, leaves grew they way they did because they were programmed to from the start, and the branches were programmed to grow the leaves, and the acorns were programmed to become the trees, and so on. 

It bothered Rincewind when Ponder used words like “program” to refer to nature. It seemed too formal, too clean. He supposed it was correct, but it didn’t sit right with him the way the little man felt so comfortable referencing the world around him with such callous, detached language. It was very clinical. But that was possibly the best word to describe Ponder overall, any other man with his level of crazed determination and unchecked ambition would be all ink stains and stubbly-chinned and tacking strings up on cork boards. Ponder had his strings, but he kept them in tidy notebooks with labels and neat handwriting with letters that fit perfectly into the spaces of his graph paper. 

 

Rincewind slouched in his usual chair. Ponder had been talking for some time but he was finding it hard to pay attention. It seemed to Rincewind that Ponder had a skill of saying a lot of complicated jargon without really conveying anything meaningful. It was a skill that he saw in several professors as well. Ponder was a true university man. There was a whiteboard in front of him with some odd stribbles of notes that Ponder would occasionally pause to write down. In the first few days of this ritual, there was a fair amount of back and forth. Rincewind, having already crossed the threshold of personal insanity by coming clean about seeing the eye and having dreams about strange patterns, saw that it was futile to hold back any longer. He’d hoped the process would be like ripping off a band-aid, just a few moments of pain and then it all fades away with time, but the longer the two of them met it seemed the deeper the wound became.

Ponder hadn’t made eye contact with Rincewind for twenty minutes. He was pacing in front of the white board with a marker in his hand and another, different colored marker tucked behind his ear. 

“You know?” He said finally, still pacing, but looking up from his feet for the first time in a while. Rincewind’s eyebrows arched involuntarily, but he didn’t stop them.

“Know what?”

“I mean, do you agree with what I just said?” Rincewind tucked his fists into his pockets and stretched his legs.

“I have no idea what you just said.” Ponder leaned over the table in between them with a hand over his brow. 

“Please tell me you were listening to any of that.” Rincewind thought about it.

“If I say that I was, will it make this conversation any shorter?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Ah, nevermind.” Ponder screwed up his face. I should be used to this by now, he thought. It was the same story anywhere he went. His aunts tended to humor him, but they never seemed to  _ understand _ anything he was saying. School had been the same, he’d never had much luck making friends, but he was always told that college would be different. In college, you’ll meet like-minded people who are passionate about the things you’re passionate about, that’s the whole point! Academia is an institution founded on curiosity, right? But time and time again Ponder found himself alone. His hand went instinctively to his pocket where he kept his phone, checking for a message from Adrian. Nothing.

 

Rincewind recognized the way Ponder’s shoulders were sloped. When he sighed, Rincewind could feel it in his own chest. He wasn’t as emotionally ignorant as he pretended to be. There are clear signs when a small jab lands on a bigger issue, the air kind of changes around you. Rincewind shifted forward and leaned over the table.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking about that thing you’d said before, something about fractals.” Ponder’s head lifted.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yesterday, I think. I was trying to describe the patterns I saw the night before in my dream.” Ponder chewed on the cap of a dry erase marker.

“I just wish we had some reliable way to recreate them. Understanding all of this would be a lot easier if I could just put a camera in your head.” Rincewind was fairly certain that the comment was intended to be some kind of a joke, but it could be hard to tell with Ponder.

“Er, yes, well, may I?” Rincewind extended his hand and Ponder surrendered a marker to him and the two traded places. On the whiteboard, Rincewind began to illustrate.

“I’ve already tried to take notes immediately after I wake up so that it’s all still fresh in my mind, but even then it’s just impossible to get all the detail right. There’s overlapping lines and numbers in the way, and circles and angles.” Rincewind drew a triangle in red marker. “So I was thinking, what if instead of trying to draw out the whole thing I just focus on one little part.”

“Right, but the problem with that is you said when you look at one number or one line for too long it starts to move.”

“That’s true, but you’re still thinking too big. I mean, with fractals, you have a bunch of little shapes that make a big shape, right? But the little shapes and the big shape are all the same thing, that’s the whole point.”

Ponder’s eyes flickered with rapt attention.

“Go on.”

Rincewind straightened the collar of his Rush t-shirt, suddenly wishing that he had maintained a more professional appearance. “We’re trying to describe everything that’s inside the big shape, like how many small shapes there are and how many numbers and lines and things. Let’s keep it simple and just focus on one part at a time.” He knocked the whiteboard with the marker in a way that he thought was very commanding, but the cap came loose and flew over the table behind Ponder’s chair. Rincewind moved to go and retrieve it, but Ponder put up a hand.

“Don’t worry about it, just finish the thought.”

Rincewind floundered. The pathway words had to take from his head to his mouth was perilous and a lot of them made less and less sense the further along they went. But, he considered, Ponder said nonsense all day long with totally undeserved confidence, why can’t I?

“Just stay with me on this,” Rincewind encouraged. “You were saying that the best way to make sense of something big is to try and understand what it’s made of at its most basic parts.”

“Kind of a pedestrian take, but yes.”

“And the problem with all these fractal patterns is that they contain each other. It’s all turtles all the way down. So if you’re trying to see the smallest turtle, you’re really still looking at an infinite number of other turtles inside of that turtle, and trying to see the bigger turtle that contains that one, you just run into the same problem.” Rincewind expanded his triangle into several other connecting triangles. “It’s just a massive headache, really.”

“But how did you get a triangle from all of this? I mean, the main problem we’re having right now is that we can’t identify the micro or macro shape here because there’s no way to record what you’re seeing in your sleep.”

“Well, see, it reminded me of something else. I read it somewhere, you know Flatland?” Ponder shook his head. “It’s about these kind of sentient shape characters, uh, I don’t really remember what happens very well, basically this square goes to different dimensions where the way everything looks kind of changes based on how many dimensions there are.” Rincewind continued to draw, this time he made a simple dot, followed by a line, then a circle, then a cube. “There’s this idea, it’s something like the square goes into the line’s dimension and all the lines perceive him as a line as well, because they can’t possibly know what a square is. Imagine all your life you’ve been lying flat on the ground without seeing any depth to things at all, like the world were a disc.” He pointed to the flat circle on the whiteboard. “And then suddenly you were here, on the cubeworld. It would be unlike anything you’ve ever seen, there would be depth, and space. It would seem totally different, but it’s not, because a cube can’t exist without a square, and a square can’t exist without a line, and so on. All turtles.”

“Each dimension builds off of the previous one, yes, I know that.” Ponder was compulsively tugging at the hair on the back of his head. “Okay, so the cube depends upon the square to exist just as the square depends upon the line. Where’s the triangle coming from?”  RIncewind snuck behind Ponder’s chair to reclaim the lost marker cap. A silence hung around them, their little nook of the library was barley lit by the flickering fluorescent strip above them. The doors had been locked hours ago, but the two of them had made a habit of staying up late nights like this. 

The isles were empty, and the faded 70’s brown and orange wave patterned carpeting met the darkness in the distance that surrounded their little bubble. The snow had continued to pile on every day, the banks growing higher and less manageable. Tree limbs had fallen over, and the road in and out of the campus was blocked off while the city tried to de-ice it, but it wasn’t a top priority. There were rolling blackouts across the city, people without heat. The cold was relentless and numbing. It took over your thoughts and grabbed you like a rider stears a horse by the reigns, making it almost impossible to think about anything else but how much you’d like to jump into a hot bath. So most faculty and students stayed indoors. Classes had been canceled until the roads were cleared. The courtyard was utterly silent, any sound made by trudging boots was snuffed out under the pervasive white noise of the constant wind. 

But the library stayed warm. The university had their renewable energy program to thank for that, some experimental kind of wind farm had shot up within the past few days and had kept the whole place running, with a few limitations. Cable and internet services were out, with cell service being strenuous and patchy at best. The rest of the world had faded away for the two men, together in the library, thinking in circles. 

Rincewind pulled up a chair and took a seat at the table with Ponder.

“That’s the tricky part,” He continued. Ponder studied his face. All of this was the tricky part, it seemed. That was the nature of… whatever it was they were trying to understand. It was all questions with no solid, feasible means of acquiring answers. It was a series of strange coincidences. The connective threads must be there, but they were so hard to see. It was, to Ponder, as if he were living inside of his notes, on paper, like in Rincewind’s discworld theory. They were only seeing things from a singular dimension, only lines, but there must be something outside of their perception that would pull all of this together, some lines that were really shapes. But how are you supposed to see something that, on a fundamental level, you’re not designed to? “Well a triangle is the simplest closed shape you can make, right?” Ponder shook his head.

“That’d be a circle. A triangle is three lines, connected at three vertices, a circle is one continuous line.” Rincewind’s face went blank. He threw the marker in his hand high into the air, leaning back in his chair and pulling the hood of his jacket over his face.

“Nevermind,” He said, as the marker fell back and hit him square on the forehead. Ponder tapped a little rhythm with his fingertips. 

“But I see what you were getting at,” He said, encouragingly. “The simplest closed form. You were trying to say that we got lost in the weeds focusing on the details that we could see but couldn’t understand. We should step back and rethink our approach entirely, because these patterns do seem to be fractals of a kind, we can’t possibly see the whole thing unless we bring our scope outside of whatever space they occupy. We need to think even bigger before we can think smaller.”

“Yes,” Rincewind lied. “That’s exactly what I was getting at.” When he pulled his hood off, he saw Ponder’s face. He was wearing this odd, serene expression, the fluorescent light from overhead casting a warm glow over him. From the side, Rincewind could see his eyes behind his thick glasses. They were a deep honey amber color. Even with all classes canceled until further notice, Ponder still dressed in a button down white collared shirt with a loose, skinny tie tucked into his chest pocket. There was a faint line of ink on his brow from where he had rubbed it before. 

Ponder had an idea, but it was slipping away from him the more he tried to put it into words. Something wanted to be  _ built _ . He’d known that for some time now, those intrusive thoughts he’d had that came marching in and totally redirected his train of thought. Something needed his attention. There was something that only he could make. He thought it was the maps, he’d been scribbling maps based on Rincewind’s drawings from memory for the past few days, trying to find points where they might connect, commonalities between the sketches, anything. He thought that if he could get the orientation right, then he could start to try and make sense of the numbers. It would be easier if they were all ones and zeros, binary code had fascinated him when he was little, but from what he could tell these numbers came in sets. Sets of eight. That probably meant something. 

He’d tried factoring them, going out on a limb and guessing that maybe they were all prime, but that lead went nowhere, and he still had this itch in the back of his head. This wasn’t enough, this wasn’t what needed to be made. It had to be something more comprehensive.

“Rincewind?” He said after a while. Rincewind was tired, obviously. They weren’t going to get anything productive done that night. 

“Hm?”

“I have a massive headache.”

“You’ve been drinking coffee non-stop since noon. And, uh.” Rincewind tapped on his own forehead, indicating the mark to Ponder. Ponder took his tie from his pocket and wiped his brow. 

“All of this just feels so desperate, and immediate, I don’t know why. I can’t sleep anymore.” Rincewind shrugged.

“I never had the best luck with sleeping, especially not now. Now that it’s every night, you know.” The wind outside was picking up, a gust shook the large panel window beside them that looked out onto the dark courtyard. There were a few lights in the distance, lamp posts and the freshman housing, but they were weak. “I just want this to be over with,” Rincewind let it slip out of him like a breath. Ponder rested his chin on his knuckles, his eyes closed.

“I don’t think it’s even started.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” Rincewind kicked Ponder’s chair lightly, but enough to make him sway. “I mean, we’ve gotten somewhere, haven’t we?” He motioned loosley to the whiteboard. “Got some nice shapes up there! Talked about, uh, dimensions and turtles and things. That’s progress.”

“You realize that whatever all of this is building up to, it’s big, right? Like, unfathomably big. Astronomically big. This is--” Ponder made a motion with his hands, as if he was trapping the universe between them, or holding a big melon. The gesture spoke for itself, Rincewind could fill in the gaps.  _ This is apocalyptic _ , he thought. That’s what you mean. Rincewind himself had been thinking as much for a while, longer than Ponder had even been aware of whatever all of this nonsense was supposed to be. It was almost a comfort. Things will end, whether we understand them or not. Ponder was just the type for whom understanding meant everything. It was the bedrock upon which he’d built his entire philosophy on life, that things could fundamentally be understood if only you tried hard enough. That’s a very hard way to live, Rincewind thought. Especially if you’re in it alone.

“I should probably pack up,” Ponder started, closing his binder with a resonant slap. As he milled about and gathered things and straightened chairs, Rincewind kicked an idea around in his head. He wasn’t sure about it, he wasn’t very sure about anything usually. His standard operating level of uncertainty was rather high. And anyway, if everything truly was coming to an end, as he’d believed, then the consequences of his actions had a limited shelf life. 

“You want to just stay at my place?” He asked. It was probably the lack of sleep that had made him so bold, that and the six pack he’d finished off himself only an hour earlier. Beer tended to invert his personality somewhat. 

 

Ponder stopped in the middle of putting a stack of books back onto a return rack. Oh great, he thought. On top of everything, now he’s going to mess with me? For what? He turned around, expecting to see Rincewind pulling some kind of face. But there was nothing, he looked how he always did. Ponder glared.

“Really?” He asked suspiciously. Rincewind started to nod slowly. 

“It’s pretty nasty out there.” He jerked a thumb towards the window and the view of the courtyard. Oh, thought Ponder, his shoulder falling out of a defensive position. Of course. 

“It’s not that far,” He continued straightening the stacks of books.

“Well,” Rincewind continued, standing upright from his seat and straightening his jacket. “I mean, we’re just going to meet up for breakfast anyways, aren’t we? It’s just a bit more convenient this way.”

“Mmm.” Ponder continued gathering his things, quickening his pace, shoving papers haphazardly into his laptop bag. Then he stopped. Rincewind was in front of him, scratching his head, keeping his gaze on anything else but Ponder. He was almost a full head taller than Ponder, a height made up mostly of legs. It occured to Ponder that he’d never stood so close to the man. His eyes were at Rincewind’s chest, where he could see the work of his lungs, swelling below his ribs. “Uh,” Said Ponder, which meant I _ ’m currently processing how I’m supposed to read this situation.  _ Rincewind placed a hand tentatively on Ponder’s shoulder. He hoped that it was innocent enough. “What,” Ponder started slowly, “What are you trying to say?” Rincewind’s hand flew away from Ponder’s shoulder and back behind his head as he spun away from him on the ball of his foot.

“Oh you’re really going to be that bastard, aren’t you?” Ponder laughed, he couldn’t help it, it snuck out from under him.

“Sorry? I’m just, you know I’m bad at reading situations.”

“Yes I do know that.”

“So was that a romantic thing?” The words came out of Ponder carefully, as though he were inspecting each one on its way out. Rincewind looked back to Ponder.

“Kind of? I think I definitely intended it to be.”

“You think or you know?”

“What’s the difference?” A real confusion flashed over Rincewind’s face. “It was a stupid idea, don’t worry about it.”

“It’s not stupid,” Ponder’s tone changed to a less serious one. He’d set his laptop bag down on the table and begun to fidget with his fingers. “I’ll stay if you’ll have me.”

“You would?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” 

“Yes.” Rincewind’s mouth opened and closed a few times.

“Yes,” He said, finally.

 

It was the first time Ponder had seen Rincewind’s room. He didn’t believe that he’d had any expectations of the place, but once the door swung open, he immediately realized that he’d had at least one. He’d expected it to be an actual room. It was a storage closet with a mattress tucked in the corner. The shelved were stuffed unceremoniously with things, some of them papers, some of them books, some of them clothes. There was a very large trunk on top of on of the shelves upon which a towel was casually tossed. Somewhere in the mess, there was a small cactus. Rincewind indicated to an empty space on one of the shelves.

“You can put your bag here.” Ponder slid the bag tentatively into the nook while Rincewind took off his shoes and jacket and tossed them up onto a shelf somewhere. “It’s small but it’s efficient. Everything just goes up.”

“Efficient,” Ponder repeated, goggle eyed at the disarray of the place. “That is a word that you could use to describe it. It would be wrong, but you could still say it.”

“It’s cozy, it’s basically a tiny house. Better Homes and Gardens would describe it as quaint.” The delirium of actually getting Ponder to even agree to this arrangement was playing seriously on his already beer sloshed brain. Out of all of the things that had happened to him recently, this felt the least realistic. “Should I, uh, take your jacket?” Ponder slid the wool cardigan off of his shoulders and handed it to Rincewind, who in turn sent it flying up towards the ceiling where it landed expertly on top of Rincewind’s jacket. 

“I guess that  _ is _ a kind of skill. And it is good and warm in here.” Rincewind sat on the mattress, thankful that he’d had all of his sheets cleaned only a few days prior and they still had that fresh detergent scent. Ponder sat beside him. “How long have you lived here?”

Rincewind scratched his chin, “Well I enrolled in spring about six years ago, I used to live in the city and I would just commute on my bike, but I was living with my Grandfather then. He passed away four years ago, been living on campus ever since, but I couldn’t afford the housing, so I worked out a deal with Henry. That’s the head librarian, I don’t think a lot of people remember his name.” It was true, Ponder thought about it and realized he’d never actually known the man’s name.

“You two are friends then?”

“I wouldn’t say that, we’re colleagues.” Ponder looked accusingly at Rincewind.

“I’ve been bringing him bagels from the cafeteria for nearly a week now. Every time I’ve seen him he’s worried about you. That’s friendship.”

“If you say so.”

“It’s a pointless concept, that whole  _ nobody in academia can ever truly be friends because we’re all ultimately in direct competition with each  _ other thing. It’s a lie, we’re competitive on an individual level, sure, but in the grand scheme of things we’re all working towards the same goals.”

“I think Karl Marx said that,” Replied Rincewind, reaching for a crumpled bottle of water that he’d been keeping on the shelf just above his bed. In doing so Ponder again got a good look at Rincewind’s chest. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the end of his tie. “Collective action.” Rincewind continued, after gulping down the remains of his water. “Or something.”

“Say,” Ponder started, “I actually am very tired.”

“Oh, sure.” Rincewind laid back as if remembering suddenly where he was. Ponder found a place next to him and placed an unsure hand on Rincewind’s chest. Rincewind, in turn, slid one of his arms behind Ponder’s head. The little heater behind the door humed sweetly. After a while, Rincewind reached for a yardstick that he kept beside the bed and used it to flick the lightswitch off.

“That’s ingenious.” Said Ponder lightly.

“It’s just lazy.” Rincewind could feel Ponder’s stomach shaking with a laugh that rolled through the both of them. After a few more minutes in silence, Ponder’s breathing slowed down. It was a soft, even tide that came in and out effortlessly. With his free hand, Rincewind maneuvered Ponder’s glasses off of his face and placed them beside the bed before closing his eyes. Somewhere close by, though they had no way of knowing it, Only You by Yaz was playing. 

 

He opened his eyes. All around him the patterns began to appear, lines moving in and out of each other, numbers, that strange undefinable color. But this time there was a voice. It was the same voice he’d been hearing all along, only now it was clear, like it was right in front of him. 

 

_ You have to keep going. There’s not much time left. _

 

Where are you?

 

_ In three days this will end. _

 

Why? Can I get an extension? What are we supposed to do?

 

_ Ponder knows. He’s already done it. _

 

Look, if its really that important then I don’t see why you can’t just give me a straight answer.

 

_ It’s collapsing. _

 

What?

 

And then it was red. All the lines, all the numbers, and the spaces inbetween. 

 

Rincewind woke up before Ponder did. There was a cold spot on his chest, and as he stirred he realized it was his own dribble. There wasn’t much he could do from his position without waking Ponder, and looking down at the sweet fellow dreaming happily beside him was stirring up some sentimental feelings that he’d thought he’d repressed years ago, but he really had to pee. Carefully, he freed his arm from behind Ponder’s head, flexing his fingers to get the blood flowing again, crept over him carefully, closing the door behind him as lightly as he could manage. And then Henry’s face was directly in front of him.

“Damn! Think you could warn me? Forchristsake.” Rincewind shouted. From the storage closet, it sounded like Ponder fell out of bed. Henry squinted behind a small pair of glasses.

“Is there someone else in there?” 

“No no, of course not, um, what is it?” Rincewind attempted to smooth his hair out a bit but it was still bed tousled. Henry shook his head in obvious disbelief.

“Anyway,” He continued, “The city has asked that we use the library as a temporary shelter for some of the families affected by the blackouts. I just wanted to let you know so that you don’t walk around without your pants on.”

“That was one time and it was during a holiday break.” Henry scratched his chin thoughtfully.

“Oh that’s right, that was the same Christmas that you pissed on the statue in front of the Dean’s office.”

“Well I clearly have pants on right now so, if you don’t mind.” Rincewind pushed his way past Henry, a gesture that, had Rincewind been anybody else in the world, would have sent Henry into a kind of primal rage, but Henry knew better. Rincewind didn’t mean to be rude, he was just very stupid sometimes. Harmless and stupid.

“Tell Ponder too,” Henry called after Rincewind, who responded with a rude gesture.

 

The library had filled up overnight, or day rather, as it was about noon when Rincewind woke up. There were cots stretched out with people in thick parkas huddling together on them, children running around, lively conversations, several groups of people reading comfortably and quietly, essentially the worst possible scenario for a university library. They were supposed to be silent, save for the occasional sniffle, and nobody was really supposed to read, they were supposed to stack a bunch of books that they needed to read next to them, open one of them up, and then just let their eyes gloss over the words and listen to a podcast. That was how university libraries worked. This? This was chaos.

And standing proudly by the front door, ushering people inside, was the archchancellor. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a well-kept beard and a well-fed stomach. Typical of university staff, he was talking at a group of people rather than talking to them. 

“We’re glad to have you all here with us,” He said, boisterous voice reaching effortlessly through the crowds, “Feel free to take advantage of our full library facilities.” Behind the grey whiskers, there was a smile spreading across his face, something Rincewind had not often seen. He stuck to the corners, keeping his face hidden as best he could, heading toward the back exit of the Library. Before he could reach it, a hand landed on his shoulder.

“Excuse me, but I wonder if I could have a word with you?” Dreading the encounter, Rincewind’s head turned around slowly with a cringe. The face he saw before him was not that of the beardy archchancellor, but the wiry, tent-pole-draped-in-cheesecloth frame of the university’s bursar. The bursar handled all the numbers when it came to budgeting, while the archchancellor handled all the budgeting when it came to budgeting. This meant that, while the bursar had the most direct and true authority on the university finances, he did not actually enforce them in any tangible way, nor would he ever care to, not when there were archaic spreadsheet algorithms he could be writing. Rincewind let go of a weighty sigh.

“I would, but I’m really rather busy at the moment.” The bursar fidgeted with a very large graduate ring on his middle finger.

“I think everyone is, only I’ve been asking everyone the same question all week and I can’t seem to get a good answer.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Rincewind made another break for the door, but the bursar called out to him.

“Did you see anything strange in the sky a few nights ago?” Rincewind paused. He looked at his feet, and then at the bursar.

“No,” He lied, then he pushed his way through the back door and trudged his way through the snow to the cafeteria.

  
  


Ponder rolled off the side of Rincewind’s mattress and landed with a crack and a thud. The crack was from his glasses that were on the floor, which he had bashed his head against, and the thud was from the rest of him. Rubbing the back of his neck, he could hear the voice of the head librarian on the other side of the door. Still shaking off sleep, he couldn’t quite make out what was being said, but he got the words  _ pissed on the statue _ and concluded that the conversation must be about Rincewind. 

He snapped one of the legs of his glasses back into place and rolled his neck around on his shoulders. That was the first sound sleep I’ve had in months, he thought. Sticking his round lenses back where they belonged on the bridge of his nose, the world came back into focus. There was a mattress beside him with a patchy red quilt and a lumpy down pillow, and all around him were tall shelves packed with eccentricities. Rincewind’s things, the thought casually rose in his mind, all of this stuff belongs to Rincewind. Above the mattress, on the bottom of the lowest shelf, was a sleeve from a book that had been pinned up. It seemed like a personal little detail, the last thing that Rincewind probably saw before he went to sleep every night. Oh, but I slept with him last night, he thought. It took a moment, but soon Ponder had his knees to his chest and his fingertips on his temples trying to recall the events of the previous night.

I  _ did _ sleep with him last night, He repeated. I just curled right up next to him and fell asleep. I even put my hand on his chest. Oh god, nothing about that was very professional. He must think I’m some… affection-starved… desperate idiot. 

Amid Ponder’s overthinking, there was a knock at the door. He wasn’t sure whether he should answer.

“It’s Henry,” Said Henry, “Just wanted to warn you that there’s a crowd out here,” And then his footsteps trailed away. A crowd? What kind of crowd would be in a library?

 

With an armful of Doritos and two Gatorades shoved into the pockets of his denim jacket, Rincewind snuck his way back through the library. He paused in front of his door, and for a moment considered that Ponder might not be there anymore. He decided to knock.

“Hello?” Came a voice from inside. Rincewind opened the door a crack.

“I have b-- well, it’s not really breakfast, but I have food.”

“Come in,” Ponder replied, unsure of why it was on him to invite Rincewind back into his own room. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the space heater with his laptop balancing on his knees. Rincewind shook some melting snow off of his hat.

“The cafeteria was slammed so I got what I could from a vending machine. It truly is dark times when we have to skimp on breakfast.” Rincewind had clearly intended for the comment to be mostly humorous, but there was a very real and chilling truth to it. From his laptop, Ponder spun a little 3D model of a sphere around in a modeling program.

“I had an idea,” He said between mouthfuls of cool ranch Doritos, “I was thinking about your theory of a discworld.” A very neglected sense of pride welled up in Rincewind at the words  _ your theory _ . “That would account for a flatworld, and our world would be a roundworld, what would the next world down that line look like?”

“You mean, what comes after a sphere?”

“Yes! In that diagram you drew the other night, it was sort of like a linear progression of simple components becoming very complex ones. Obviously, it’s very hard to imagine, but in our world we have x, y, and z coordinates.” He spun his laptop around to reveal his little grey model sphere to Rincewind, which was now covered in a latticework of graph lines. “But in theory, there’s more dimensions than that. Directions that we can’t perceive within the limited framework of just thinking about things with only these three dimensions. So that lead me to this.” He clicked something, and suddenly another shape appeared next to the sphere, something that resembled a sphere at first, but it turned and folded in on itself, looping around and around, the graph lines overlaid on top of the shape being the only way to tell what bits were going where. “That’s a hypersphere, it’s the next step up from a sphere.” Rincewind looked on suspiciously.

“All this before breakfast?” Ponder shrugged. After shaking off his coat, Rincewind took a seat next to him. Ponder continued to fiddle with his laptop.

“It feels like I’m getting somewhere now. I’ve been scanning through the lost media archives and I’ve found a few different texts referencing hyperspheres but they’re all just conjecture. The only model of a hypersphere we have is virtual, obviously.” He scratched the back of his head. “I really don’t know why, but this feels like the right direction.” He looked up at Rincewind, who was looking very pale. “Something wrong?”

Rincewind didn’t like the way the grey mass on the screen was turning. It looked a lot like how his stomach felt. It was confusing and hard to focus on, and in that sense it bore a striking resemblance to the dreams he’d been having. There was a word on the tip of his tongue that he was trying to remember.

“Ponder,” He said. 

“Yes?”

“I had a dream last night. It was different this time.” Rincewind’s focus stayed on the twisting, turning figure. It pulled itself out of itself and fell back into itself again, shifting uncomfortably under the layers of graph lines, a revolting, undulating mass. There was a ringing in his ears. It was as if he could hear the thing beating like a heart. The word he wanted to remember was clawing at his throat, trying to escape him, trying to pull itself out of him. The figure on the screen went in and out of itself.

 

It collapsed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really don't understand why sometimes when importing a doc the formatting will keep indentations and sometimes it will not. It is a great mystery. Sorry this one took a fuckin minute, last chapter should be up a LOT sooner! I'm planning on it being out on either Halloween or the day before! I'm doing some Weird Shit with math that is Definitely Not Accurate but Let Me Live.

**Author's Note:**

> lowkey wanted to call this "dicks and demicubes" lol.  
> this was supposed to be a one shot fluff fic to procrastinate on actual work but here the fuck we are I guess.  
> have not figured out how to indent things in the rich text editor and tbh it.... kind of annoys me the way it fucks with formatting. please leave all comments and concerns in the form of dirty limericks.  
> hmu on tumblr @drwizzard


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